Liberal Democratic Party
Jan. 18th, 2021 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
b_auspolLiberal Democratic Party (LDP)
https://www.ldp.org.au/
Oh no it’s time for the libertarians.
The Liberal Democratic Party were founded in 2001. They’ve been fighting to keep the Liberal Party from making them change their name ever since, and have been successful at it. They currently have three Legislative Council members: 2 in Victoria and one in WA. This means they have a representative up for re-election this time around. They have previously been successful at the 'confuse the voters by having Liberal in their name' tactic, which is how David Leyonhjelm first got into Federal Parliament, but I suspect their improved prospects since then have revolved around people actually knowing what the party is.
After looking at the quotas for the 2017 election, I now suspect some group voting ticket nonsense is how the Lib Dems managed to get that single seat in the South Metropolitan regions. This is also the only region they were to the left of the Liberals and thus the only region in which they had an initial quota over 0.1. They managed to pick up the Australian Christians, Daylight Savings Party and PHON exclusions to jump into the lead. DSP were absolutely playing group voting ticket games, and AC preferred the Lib Dems over PHON, otherwise PHON would probably have taken the spot. So if they can keep this seat (which had a 0.27 quota primary vote while majorly to the left of the Libs on the ballot) is absolutely going to come down to the group voting ticket negotiations.
I’ll be frank – I seriously dislike the LDP. I don’t much like libertarians, and they have a tendency of electing particularly odious members of the species (David Leyonhjelm, anyone?)
One of the pages they DO have is their “Team” page, and wow is that ever a line up of white guys who look rather similar. There is An Woman, and two of the dudes might have some melanin, but I can feel the techbro leeching out of the screen at me, particularly in the number of Men With A Number 3 Haircut/Slicked Over Hair And A Lush Beard.
Sorry. But it all looks very very stereotypical.
In positive news they already have a page with a Five Point Plan for the WA election. Five points only! I’m excited to see what they want to sell me.
The Lib Dems are here with their plan for “getting Western Australians back to work, building a stronger society and guiding our State out of the COVID crisis and back to prosperity.”
I have a feeling they are going to have feelings at me about the Budget Deficit.
Point One is “Bring Jobs Back to WA”! People are looking for work. Employers are burdened under that unwieldy red tape and taxes that the government insists on for things like “ensuring you pay your workers” and “maybe don’t cause ecological disasters”. Have a guess what their policy is.
If you guessed “Cut all payroll tax so that employers can use that money to pay workers!” Congratulations, you win a trickle-down internet. Your reward is the amount of money that actually gets used to pay staff rather than profits.
I’m sorry. I’m getting very facetious here but it’s the only way I can deal with reading about the Lib Dems.
They also want to remove stamp duty on housing, give tax exemptions for training staff, and remove “outdated restrictions on retail trade”. I’m assuming the last means limits on evening and weekend trading hours. After a quick glance, it looks like outside of Perth they still have Sunday closures, so that will be what they want to change, along with the fact that IN Perth Sunday trading hours start at 11am.
I suspect that last policy has some fans. The rest of it is very ho hum libertarian ‘if you just don’t tax us the Market Will Solve It’.
Point Two is “Provide a COVID-19 Response with a Focus on Wellbeing”.
Ah, here we go, here’s the border policy. They are upset about the border closures and lockdown. They want mental health taken into account as far as restrictions go, want a CHO for Mental Health on the State Disaster Council, and want the hard border opened and replaced with a “smart border” focused on contact tracing.
Ok, far be it for me to tell WA what they should be doing about their border, since I live in a different state, but I will point out two things:
1. The mental health effects of the last year are definitely something that is going to be with us for a long time. This is something each community is going to have to grapple with: what level of risk the community is willing to accept for a situation that might be less mentally harmful. I think a lot of very hard decisions have been made, and those decision have saved lives, but equally after 12 months and the continuing improvement of tracing efforts and case suppression/elimination, taking the mental health of a community into account in regards to altering the response is something I am sure all the health departments are weighing up.
2. 28 days since last case is the strictest border restriction of any state.
And there I will leave it as this is a WA issue and I’ll let WA people argue about it.
I can see why the Lib Dem party would campaign for lesser restrictions, however, since they are LIBERTARIANS. I’m interested that they want to keep any border at all. That’s actually quite a bit of government-involvement for the Lib Dems.
Point Three is “Help Ease the Cost of Living”.
And back to standard Libertarian policies of “CUT COSTS”. They want to scrap a number of charges on water and electricity bills (I’m not familiar enough with WA bills to know if these are just additional taxes, or levys that pay for things like system maintenance and ‘trying to keep rural bills from being astronomically high by sharing out the costs of transportation of utilities across such a giant state’). They also want to freeze rate increases for two years and decrease third party rego by letting motorists pick their provider.
Okay, as a resident in a state that DOES have a multiple insurer rego scheme: third party rego STAYS APPROXIMATELY THE SAME even with multiple insurers. Believe me. I run the numbers through the government comparison site every year and it’s always like $3 different between the providers. There’s no real competition. They can charge what they like. There are a couple of insurers that really don’t like under-25 drivers, but other than that, once you make it to ‘we trust you’ age, the rate is the rate is the rate. Might you get an initial price drop? Perhaps. But I doubt it would be much.
I suspect if I knew more about what the particular items they want to cut involve, they’re probably slightly in the realm of “useful cashflow for the government/company” but they are also on utility bills. Scrapping costs off utilities generally means that taxes have to pay for more of it.
In any case. We all know libertarians aren’t fond of things like collectively paying to maintain utilities.
Point 4 is “Create Safer Communities and a Stronger Society”.
Oh yeah, this is about policing. Ok. They want to have the police focus more on community policing and local engagement, and more on stopping violent crime and not on non-violent petty offences.
And you know what? Yes, I think policing does need some reform, and to be focusing on working with not working against, but I do note that this is a “reform policing” policy written by a bunch of white guys and I don’t see a single thing about race in there. And that’s noticeable in 2021. This is your old school “leave our drug and traffic offences alone” policy reform request rather than addressing the systemic injustices in policing.
The LDP also would like a school voucher program, because they’ve never seen a silly US policy they didn’t like. More access to independent schools rather than using funds on improving our public school system to make things less tiered.
In terms of health policies, they want to reduce ramping at hospitals and establish a 24 hour Drug and Mental Health Emergency Department. Honestly both of these policies sound like good goals. Ramping (that is, ambulances not being able to bring their patients into the hospital due to lack of space in the emergency department) is definitely a public health issue, and if the WA Health system can’t cope at present (I found an article from December 2020 saying they are at crisis point, without any community COVID and having pretty much destroyed the 2020 influenza season), I worry about what might happen if they end up under strain from a COVID outbreak. And a mental health emergency department sounds like the sort of policy that could be helpful, as long as there were enough beds and increased capacity associated with it. It would depend on how it was structured, I feel, but it could be a useful tool if it had the right experts and personnel assigned to it. More provision of mental health services is generally a positive.
Point 5 is “Hold the Government to Account”.
They start by telling us that the Government works for the people, not the other way around. Thus they want a freeze on politician AND public sector wages “until the State budget is balanced”.
Uh.
Most public servants in Australia have already had to defer pay rises this past year due to COVID. Suggesting that they can’t have another one until WA has fully written the cost of COVID off their books? When we don’t know how long that might take? That seems unduly punitive and unfair. I presume the intention is to try and make politicians work harder to balance the budget by taking away their money, but this doesn’t seem an effective method.
In addition, government budgets aren’t necessarily better when they are in surplus. There’s a school of economic thought that says the best governments are always in a level of deficit, because it means they are spending the tax they receive on investing in and improving their communities.
Borrowing money right now is really, really cheap. It’s better to spend and spend big to get through the current situation than it is to tell people they can’t have pay rises until the magic number returns.
Libertarians!
They would also like a Parliamentary Budget Office to “independently cost policy proposals and ensure good value for money and less political spin”. I have no idea if that would be helpful in reducing any porkbarrelling.
Ensure emergency powers and temporary measures are truly temporary by introducing ‘Sunset Clauses’ as a standard clause in all new legislation.
I assume they’re trying to target the possibility of Health Orders sticking around any longer than necessary out of suspicion that maybe someone might just decide to do a coup and never open the borders again or something, but sunset clauses on all new legislation would be a gigantic headache. That would mean that EVERYTHING would have to come back up in parliament, get debated and again and extensions agreed on any legislation after a set period. That’s a lot of extra busy work. Most of the time parliament already tags sunset clauses onto anything they think might need revisiting – why force every piece of legislation to go through it?
Remove the secrecy around the State Disaster Council and subject all directions, health advice and deliberations to Freedom of Information requests.
This reads as “I am upset that my FOI requests over the border are being denied and think McGowan is being a petty tyrant”.
I am sure there are some decisions that have been made in the past year that could use some sunlight and investigation to find out what happened and why. No doubt. That has and will continue to happen.
However, I worry about health advice and deliberations being more subject to FOI in that there is probably quite a lot of personal detail about people who have COVID and their locations and movements and health conditions in that decision-making, all of which should be kept as private as is reasonably possible. There is every chance for any health advice FOI where that information was removed, it would look like “and due to GIANT BLACK OUT we decided that the restriction was necessary”.
Social media check! Well, they don’t appear to use their twitter, but the last thing on it from 2018 was concern about white farmers in South Africa. Which tracks. Then legalising vaping, and miners having to deal with too much red tape. Gosh, none of this surprises me, and I particularly feel extra sorry for the red tape miners have to deal with, given all the dangers and harm that can result in that work. Their facebook is more active, but aside from some “What is McGowan Hiding Via The Emergency Powers” and “Release Information about the Hard Border”, it’s currently actually on message with their website for the election. Their media strategy is actually successfully communicating there.
This is probably the most well-put together party I’ve looked at so far, mediawiser. I guess having someone currently in parliament has helped with that, but it seems more on message and less “I need to rant at the world” than Leyonhjelm used to be.
Any Predictions?
Actually, no! We forgot them. But it’s ok as they’ve given us plenty of material about their response to COVID above.
Is this party trying to kill me?
I think I have to go with no, here. None of the policies they are taking into this election are aimed to kill me. I didn’t see any gun regulation changes or anti-vaccine messaging or other items of concern. They’ve been very slick at hiding it, if there is any.
Is this party trying to harm me?
Again, I don’t think so. I think their policies would probably harm WA in that they want to strip away a lot of taxation while also freezing salaries and forcing the budget back into balance during a pandemic, but I can’t see where their policies are out to harm individuals.
Conclusion
The Liberal Democratic Party are libertarians. They believe in as much personal freedom and as few regulations and taxes as possible. They are definitely taking the chance to put the boot into McGowan over what they consider to be overreach in his response to COVID, which tracks pretty well with their general policies.
I’m suspicious of what they are hiding in such slick and minimised policy marketing for the election, but there actually are a couple of gems in there – the hospital policies for one – that might be worth considering. On the other hand, they have absolutely nothing about a climate policy and their policing policy doesn't mention a single thing about race issues, so no kudos there.
I still think they are a bunch of white dudes interested in white dude issues and as far as I am concerned the various Australian governments should continue to throw money at their states and territories during COVID and afterwards to help their populations now, help the recovery after, and help reverse the recession we were already heading into before all this hit, rather than embrace libertarian fiscal austerity just for The Budget.
I would rank them ahead of any of the dangerous right wing parties. But still on the bottom half of the ballot.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-19 04:27 am (UTC)I presume if I dug into the federal site I could look at all the nitty gritty, but it's a very stripped back campaign website and these are always looking at what parties are campaigning on as much as what they believe in.